Neil Armstrong

post from Kmareka.com on 25 August 2012 04:00:43 PM. © Kmareka.com

Earthrise from Apollo 8

Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon has died at the age of 82. As we celebrate his extraordinary life, let’s celebrate the pride, the audacity and the achievement of that America. The rover, Curiosity, travels the surface of Mars. The torch is passed.

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RIP Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon

post from Daily Kos on 25 August 2012 04:00:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Neil Armstrong works at the LM in the only photo taken of him on the moon from the surface.Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon, has died at age 82.

The family described him as a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend, and also as "a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job."
That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.
When Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, he fulfilled the goal that had been set by President John F. Kennedy just eight years earlier. [...]
Armstrong's family said, "While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
"For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request: Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink."

That's the least we can do to honor a true American hero. Condolences to Mr. Armstrong's family.

There's ongoing discussion in Diogenes2008's diary.

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Utah TV Station Wont Air Gay-Themed Show, Says
Its Inappropriate For Family Viewing

post from ThinkProgress on 25 August 2012 03:53:16 PM. © ThinkProgress

An NBC-affiliate in Utah will not air The New Normal, a sitcom about a committed gay couple who hire a surrogate to carry a child. The show is set to premere on September 11, but after watching the pilot episode, KSL-TV has decided the program was inappropriate to show “during family viewing time”: “After viewing [...]

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gress0Borg0Clgbt0C20A120C0A80C250C7453710Cutah0Etv0Estation0Ewont0Eair0Egay0Ethemed0Eshow0Esays0Eits0Einappropriate0Efor0Efamily0Eviewing0C/story01.htm

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Why Community Solar Matters: Colorados Program
Allots Nine Megawatts In 30 Minutes

post from ThinkProgress on 25 August 2012 03:08:45 PM. © ThinkProgress

by John Farrell, via Energy Self Reliant States When you subtract out shady roofs, renters, and other factors, only about 25% of Americans have a place to install solar power. With the high upfront cost of a complete system, the potential solar universe shrinks further. That changes with ?community solar.? After a long wait on [...]

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gress0Borg0Cclimate0C20A120C0A80C250C7388710Cwhy0Ecommunity0Esolar0Ematters0Ecolorados0Eprogram0Eallots0Enine0Emegawatts0Ein0E30A0Eminutes0C/story01.htm

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Romney/Ryan Claim That No One Over 55 Will Be
Affected by Their Medicare Plan is False (Surprise!)

post from Firedoglake on 25 August 2012 03:00:56 PM. © Firedoglake

Seeing GOP talking heads spew out the pathetic talking point that any changes to Medicare under Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would "only affect people 55 and under" was bad enough -- we're to believe that today's voting grandmas and grandpas should be A-OK[...]

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Romney's latest excuse for not releasing taxes:
I'm a Mormon

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 25 August 2012 03:00:39 PM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

Seriously?Besides making the issue of his Mormon religion now an issue in the campaign, Romney is ignoring both his own recent history of releasing a few years of returns as well as the precedent that his own father set when he released twelve years of tax returns.Were Mitt Romney and his own father bad Mormon when they released tax documents previously, and if it was fine with their...

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Smart-Ass/Dumb as a Post

post from Connecting.the.Dots on 25 August 2012 03:00:07 PM. © Connecting.the.Dots

On a weekend lull before new political storms, what poet Randall Jarrell called ?the sad heart at the supermarket? is filled with mixed emotions over American life, a tangle of instinctive knowing and willed ignorance he evoked 50 years ago.

?If we meet an honest and intelligent politician,? Jarrell wrote, ?a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.?

In that era, JFK would say, ?You can?t beat brains.? But his own experience proved you sometimes could. David Halberstam devoted an ironically titled book, ?The Best and the Brightest,? to how Kennedy intellectuals led the country into a Vietnam quagmire.

Now, in a time of overflowing opinions, the question comes back in haunting new forms, in dispiriting debate over elitism vs. common sense, rigorous analysis vs. raging prejudice, sophistication vs. aggressive ignorance.

As Todd Akin makes Mitt Romney look like an intellectual giant, Romney?s own denseness becomes an irresistible target. Willingly or not, we are dragged into new versions of the old argument.

Why can?t we have better? Even, as in the VP contest, the lines of demarcation break down to mislabel Paul Ryan wonkiness and Joe Biden emotional outbursts, the categories don?t hold their own contradictions.

If we reduce national discussion to liberal soft-headedness/conservative common sense or liberal smarts/conservative stupidity, we broaden the national breach and narrow any ground for connection, let alone consensus.

That may be our inevitable fate but, as liberals relish the final installment of HBO?s ?Newsroom,? it may be worth remembering that Aaron Sorkin?s ?cri de coeur at the uncivil state of America in the digital age? is an entertainment, not a religious revelation.

Those who cannot keep up with the characters? rapid-fire references are not inferior to viewers who do, only less attuned to the show?s lonely-hearts glaze over legitimate issues of media, politics and morality. William F. Buckley would have appreciated it.

Half a century ago, Randall Jarrell wrote, ?The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.?

John F. Kennedy once wryly quoted a distraught mother?s complaint, ?My son wants to be a politician and they?re teaching him poetry.?

Not too many have that problem today.

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Midday open thread: Custer's last stand

post from Daily Kos on 25 August 2012 03:00:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Civil war era portrait of George Armstrong Custer Here's Custer. But where's his birth certificate?There comes a point where you just have to applaud the crazy. Yesterday, a member of the Republican Party's executive committee slammed Gov. Yvette Martinez (R-NM) for having the audacity to meet with tribal leaders. Why? It dishonors the memory of George Custer of Little Bighorn fame. Who knows, maybe they'll give this guy a speaking slot next to Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Anyway, to the links. But really, how can they get better than this?

Jerry Nelson, who gave his voice and puppeteering skills to make several Sesame Street characters come alive, passed away yesterday at age 78. The show won't be the same without him.
Paul Krugman, on Paul Ryan and the link between Rand and the gold standard:
In early 2011, Mr. Ryan, newly installed as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, gave Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, a hard time over his expansionary policies. Rising commodity prices and long-term interest rates, he asserted, were harbingers of high inflation to come; ?There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,? he intoned, ?than debase its currency.?
Since then, inflation has remained quiescent while long-term rates have plunged ? and the U.S. economy would surely be in much worse shape than it is if Mr. Bernanke had allowed himself to be bullied into monetary tightening. But Mr. Ryan seems undaunted in his monetary views. Why?
Well, it?s right there in that 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he declared that he always goes back to ?Francisco d?Anconia?s speech on money? when thinking about monetary policy. Who? Never mind. That speech (which clocks in at a mere 23 paragraphs) is a case of hard-money obsession gone ballistic. Not only does the character in question, a Galt sidekick, call for a return to the gold standard, he denounces the notion of paper money and demands a return to gold coins.
And given that, is it any surprise that the Republican Party's platform calls for a commission to look at restoring the link between gold and the dollar? Rand's ideas aren't just consuming the Republican Party's views on taxes and social services; they're striking at the very heart of monetary policy. It's really bizarre stuff.
Just what exactly is Vitter doing on Twitter? Such a diaper dandy, that one.
It's a possibility that Mitt Romney might not appear on ballots in the State of Washington, as Rachel Maddow explains. If that does happen, it wouldn't affect the top of the ticket because Romney has just about as much chance at winning Washington as Obama has at winning Oklahoma. But it might depress Republican turnout to some degree, which would be great news for Democrats running in statewide and congressional races.
Newark Mayor and rising Democratic star Cory Booker is, as expected, weighing a run against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. If he does, you can bet it will be the most-watched gubernatorial race in the nation. Obama 2.0 and all that.
Proving once again that neither member of the Republican ticket has any shame about race-baiting regardless of anything resembling veracity, Paul Ryan made the same old lying claim about welfare-to-work waivers:
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. ? Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan says President Barack Obama wants to ease work requirements for welfare recipients even though that claim has been largely debunked by independent fact checkers.
Ryan told donors at a $1.2 million fundraiser in Missouri on Thursday that Obama wants to strip the work requirements from the welfare reform law. Ryan says it showed the president wants to promote dependency on government as a solution to economic woes.
Is it true? No. but who cares? Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are white, and they're here to convince you that Barack Obama is a foreign, Muslim-sounding black man of indeterminate heritage who wants to give your tax dollars away to indigent minorities. But no, that's not racist at all!
Former Virginia Republican Congressman Virgil Goode has submitted more than double the number of signatures required to get his name on the presidential ballot under the byline of the theocratic far-right Constitution Party in his home state. With Virginia expected to be close, that could be very bad news for Mitt Romney, which is why the Republican Party is going to challenge the signatures:
Goode said Friday that he submitted more than 20,000 signatures on Wednesday and collected at least 1,000 in 10 congressional districts. The former state senator and congressman said he doesn't believe a Virginia candidate has been denied ballot access after submitting as many signatures.
"We're hopeful, but we'll find out on Sept. 4th for sure," he said.
Goode said Republicans mounted a challenge that kept the Constitution Party off the ballot in Pennsylvania, even though more than 34,000 petition signatures were submitted.
"I'm sure they are looking not just there but in every state they can," Goode said.
Losing Virginia again would be almost a death-knell for Romney: it would require him to win Ohio and Florida, and at least two from among NH, WI, IA, CO and NV. Not a good situation to reach 270.

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Democrats Go After GOP for Having Huckabee Speak
at Convention

Huckabee Defends Akin By Misleading About Obama And Abortion

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It looks like the Republicans have got themselves a Huckabee problem for their upcoming convention. Democrats Call On Romney To Drop Huckabee From Tampa Over Akin:

Democrats say Mitt Romney has a Todd Akin problem and, by extension, a Mike Huckabee problem. The conservative radio host has reaffirmed his support for the embattled Senate nominee, just before he?s set to speak in a primetime slot in Tampa Monday night. Democrats are urging the GOP to boot Huckabee, one of its biggest social conservative stars, from the lineup.
American Bridge, the Democratic tracking firm, is launching an online drive to push Huckabee from the Tampa podium next week. The group says that keeping Huckabee on the schedule suggests the GOP isn?t serious about distancing itself from Akin and his stated views on female biology.
On Thursday, Huckabee took his party to task for calling on Akin to quit the Senate race in Missouri following Akin?s ?legitimate rape? implosion, making the former Arkansas governor the most prominent of Akin?s remaining conservative defenders. [...]
That set up a potentially awkward situation for Republicans, who scheduled Huckabee to speak in the same primetime block Monday night as Ann Romney. (On Friday morning, reports surfaced that Ann Romney?s speech may be moved from Monday night after TV networks said they wouldn?t air it.)
So far, Republicans won?t say whether Huckabee?s support for Akin and will change anything Tampa. A spokesperson for convention organizers did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning. As long as Huckabee?s scheduled to speak, Democrats say they can keep talking about Akin.

Read the rest and check out the new ad American Bridge is going to be running against them over this. It's about time to see Democrats on the attack instead of the other way around.

Huckabee appeared on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox this Friday to defend Akin and as Media Matters noted, HuckaJesus did his usual amount of very un-Christian-like lying on there: Fox's Huckabee Defends Akin By Misleading About Obama And Abortion .

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Apple-Samsung Trial: Another Loss for Consumers

Patent expert and author Leah Shaver told Wired, ?When companies turn to litigation rather than innovation, consumers lose.?[...]

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